Rina Flannigan
Rina enjoys listening to music whenever she has free time, which suffice to say is more often now that she is looking for a new school to attend. She sings as well as dances to anything that she listens to. Due to her love of music, she is learning now to play the guitar, which, she has self-taught herself for the past two years by looking up sheet music to different songs on the internet. While not skilled or a large fan of the Duel Monsters card game like her sister, she is learning how to play but considers it to be more of a side hobby. She knows the basics of the game given that Rei has taught her how to play it and she does find it interesting, especially since it involves a whole bunch of math, something that she is also quite good at. Academically, Rina has no problems passing her classes. She may not be extremely intelligent but she is smart in her own right enough to make good grades and honor roll. She is just about the sweetest person you can ever meet, having no problems making friends with others. She loves to meet new people and doesn't judge them by their past transgression for she feels that everyone deserves a chance at redemption no matter whom or what they are. This gives her a very optimistic view which is very different from that of her sister and cousin. This doesn't mean she isn't close with them. Quite the contrary, Rina is very close with her family. She doesn't even hate her mother for the bad decisions she made in regards to the affair she had with her father where she left her previous marriage to be with him. Rina is fully aware that she has an older have sister named Rie Saotome whom she hopes to get to know someday and be close to her like family should be but at the moment is just very indifferent about it right now. Rina's optimistic point of view towards people in general makes her a very naïve young girl for her age, which is quite common. Though she believes that deserve a second chance may be the very ones out to try and hurt her so there are times when she is just too trusting of others if she doesn't know them completely. She's fully aware that her family isn't as close as it should be, mostly due to her mother's actions in leaving her last marriage because she was pregnant with her older sister and eventually married their father. It is hard for her to not sometimes wonder if her and her sister had never been born, would they still be close. In many ways, she believes her and her sister being here the reasons why their mother doesn't associate with the father of her eldest daughter or with her daughter in general. Because she is the youngest, Rina does sometimes feel left out of everything, feeling that the attention is often on Rei because she isn’t so great at dueling and her cousin Kaku who is a teen idol while she isn’t anything or anyone special but wants to be. As such, she strives hard to do her best at everything she does when she really just needs to believe in herself a little more. Moving on, Rina may possess some musical talent in retrospect to singing, dancing and playing the guitar, but that doesn't necessarily mean she’s professionally skilled at it. Since she self-taught herself how to play the guitar by reading sheet music online, her skills are not where they should be. She's good but she tends to end up playing the wrong cords or tuning her guitar too much to the point it doesn't play out the cords properly when she plays it. As for the side hobby, dueling, she's still learning how to play, only understanding the basics but is only intrigued by the math portion of it, thus having lost multiple times against her sister and only won a few. Appearance Much like her sister, Rina is short, her height being 5’2’’ with long black hair that stops all the way down past her back but above her hips when let down but she mainly wears her hair up in a skinny high pony-tai with two thick bangs on either side of her face. She doesn’t consider herself to be very pretty, not that appearance was a very big issue on Rina’s part but she isn’t displeasing to look at in the slightest. The dominant eye color of her family is violet with her sister and cousin Kaku Sakuma being the only ones that have different eye colors. Her eyes are not rounded but oval shaped and are less angular than the rest of the females in her family. As for her skin complexion, Rina’s has a very peach-pale shade to it but not too pale to the point she looks like a fixed up doll. She’s very petite obviously, weighing at, at least 90lbs to 100lbs which is a normal weight for a girl her size and her cup size is that of an A, meaning she’s still very much underdeveloped and still growing. To many, she comes across as frail and delicate because of the appearance she displays when that is not the case. She is very much strong and healthy even if she doesn’t look it. As for her attire, Rina has grown accustomed to wearing a red version of a blue girls uniform that Tsukuba sometimes provides to girls who can’t afford to go out and buy a uniform to wear. It consists of a long sleeved white uniform shirt with a red V-neck collar with one black stripe going through it, red skirt, black socks and brown suede shoes. For casual attire she is seen wearing clothes like t-shirts, no sleeved shirts, dresses, skirts, jean shorts, capri-pants with sneakers, sandals, slides, platform shoes (of different colors), etc. She can be seen carrying her guitar case with her guitar in it on her back everywhere she goes. History Rina Flannigan is the daughter of an American man named Terrance Flannigan and a Japanese woman named Yumiko Flannigan, previously known as Yumiko Saotome, and she has an older sister named Rei Flannigan and an elder half-sister named Rie Saotome. Unlike Rei, Rina is not the product of an affair but instead was born within the sanctity of marriage. She had a fairly easy life growing up as any younger sister could have but she wasn’t in the spotlight much like she was. No, Rina mostly played backseat, to her sister. Rei was only ten when Rina was born and by then, their mother had moved to the US, Tallahassee, FL to be exact, to be with the father of her two daughters, having divorced her lawyer husband to be with Terrance. Neither Rei nor Rina hold any resentment towards their mother because of her actions in going about bringing them into this world, especially Rina as she saw no point. Adults always make mistakes, that’s how she looked at it and it was nothing new to her. However, she couldn’t help but be curious about the elder sister that she had down in Japan but never put much of an emphasis in asking more about her. Not like Rei had on a regular basis, to a point of wanting to go down there and meet her. Rina was off in her own little world, keeping herself occupied with learning things like music, singing, dancing and even self-teaching herself how to play the guitar but unfortunately is still learning. Rina loves music, listening to it anytime she had free time which was a lot. She’d listened to any genre so long as the song didn’t suck because if there’s one thing she cannot stand is listening to music that sucks. She’d grown into the singing along with anything she heard as well as dancing to it, just for fun but she found that she enjoyed it so much. She did all of this while Rei usually went off and participated in Duel Monsters tournaments and either winning prizes or becoming runner up behind someone who did win. Rei would even teach Rina how to play but she only understood the basics, being only interested in the math part when it came to the life points, which was her biggest weakness in the game. So dueling basically became a side hobby for her but she did play whenever Rei wanted to, only managing to win three times but losing quite a bit. Rina also did attend school, the same schools that her sister went to that consistently have a problems with bullies. Thankfully, she never had this problem since she loved meeting new people, first and foremost and second, never had any problems with anybody as she was nice to them all the time. This is because she made it a point not to put herself out there, to avoid being seen. The last thing she wanted was to be bothered by stupid students who only want to fight and cause problems all the time. Instead, she kept her mind focused on her studies and her hobbies, which her parents were proud of her for that. Their mother however was not so much thrilled at the idea that Rei eventually wanted to leave the states to go to Japan to meet her elder half-sister Rie. Dead-set against it, Yumiko finally caved in under the agreement that Rei would be placed under her former brother and law’s Raihito Sakuma’s guardianship while she attended school down there as well. Rina didn’t see what the big deal was with her sister going down there because eventually, her mother’s former family would somehow cross paths someday. She did believe her mother deserved a chance at redemption and it would be stupid of her half-sister’s father to not allow them to see her if they wanted to visit. Of course, it’s not as if she knew the man so she couldn’t really say vouch for how he would react to his ex-wife’s daughter wanting to reconcile with her Japanese sister. At the same time though, she did find out she had cousins, one being very friendly in particular, her name being Kaku Sakuma, who was a teen model that traveled all over the world at a young age. She lived in Okinawa, making it to where she had to come into the town of Tokyo for school. Rina stayed down in Tallahassee, focusing on music and school. Academically, Rina’s smart enough to make the honor roll but she’s not extremely intelligent. She’s a very sweet person who really only wants to make friends while trying to figure out what she wishes to do with her life. But she’s young and has plenty of time to make such big decisions. Her mother on the one hand, is worried that her daughters might end up making the same mistakes that she made in her life, which isn’t the case. Not with Rina. Given her age, she has really no intentions of being obsessed with boys and dating like her sister who is currently chasing after a boy named Hayate Nishikawa who still hasn’t given her the time of day at all. She’s trying to be optimistic about her sister’s love life but even she could see that, that’s not going anywhere anytime soon until Hayate either admits he likes her or tells her once and for all that he just wants to be friends and nothing more. And it’s not as if Rina herself hasn’t been approached by guys her own age or a year older but again, she’s not interested. All she wants to do is pass school and work on music if at all possible. So she doesn’t understand just what her mother is so worried about for. It’s not as if she’s going around hating her for her past mistakes. It’s all in the past, it’s better to focus on the future or at least that’s how Rina views everything, time to let it go and move on. Though this also makes her naïve as well, which would allow others to take advantage of her if they truly wanted to, but so far that hasn’t happened yet thankfully, another thing that Yumiko was worried about when it came to her youngest daughter. But as much as Rina loves her mother, both her parents really, if they could loosen the rope with Rei and let her do her own thing than they could do the same with her. She needed a new change of scenery and had called up her sister one day, telling her that she was going to come down to Tokyo but not for the same reasons as hers. No, she wanted to attend a school that her help her progress further with her music since Tallahassee was beginning to suck so hard with the way the economy was going down and a lot of schools ran out of funding for things for the students, one being band and chorus. Yumiko and Terrance both were okay with Rina’s reasons and allowed her to go to Tokyo under Raihito’s guardianship just like her sister. She was able to meet her cousin Kaku face to face (because for a while she only spoke to her and Rei over the phone) whom she surprisingly enjoyed her company and thought her job as a teen model was amazing. She adored Okinawa with the scenery it’d provided but didn’t understand while her cousin didn’t attend the schools there. But she found out why. The reason being was because a school like Tsukuba Academy, being as prestigious as it was, provided a lot of courses and opportunities for students with many talents. Rina wasn’t sure she wanted to attend the school, learning of how expensive it was but they did provide what she was looking for which was music courses. Rei was happy that her sister had decided to attend Tsukuba and not any other school because she would be able to see her and Kaku all day, every day. So now, Rina is officially an enrolled student at Tsukuba but won’t be attending classes until the fall since there was no need for her to take summer courses, given that she is already caught up with everything. Rina does feel a bit awkward and out of place but will try and make the best out of starting her eighth year at Tsukuba while Rei and Kaku will be ninth graders. Plot Rina along with her sister Rei became the first known targets of a sinister plot to turn Earth into a dark and desolate unhappy world by an evil woman known as the 'Princess of Disaster'. She had disturbed a youma seed thinking that it was some sort of strange rock, causing it to awaken and attack her and her sister while they were on the playground talking to one another about the difficulties of them trying to fit into being students at Tsukuba Academy. She and Rei have a hard time trying to make friends but the problems that they endure are different from each other but the ending result is the same. Rina doesn't remember all that much about what'd happened after she was attacked but remembers something did happen to the both of them. Rina's Deck Lists AMAZONESS DECK Love Interests Coming Soon! Trivia *In person, Rina is actually shyer than stated when interacting with others. *Originally, Rina did not want to attend Tsukuba Academy. She wanted to attend T-A Private Academy for Girls but reluctantly decided on Tsukuba as to not upset her sister. *After talking with her sister about her decision on what school to go to, she'd decided upon staying at Tsukuba for a little while but transferring to another school later on.